Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Answers About 311, Part 2

By The New York Times September 11, 2008 3:52 pmSeptember 11, 2008 3:52 pm

Paul J. Cosgrave

Following is the second set of answers from Paul J. Cosgrave, the commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. This week, he answered City Room readers’ questions about New York City’s 311 hot line. (While we are no longer accepting questions on this feature, readers are encouraged to continue the dialogue by posting comments.)

Why don’t the operators ever connect you to the department that you want? Every time I call, I have to put up with 20 minutes worth of questions, then they tell me that they’ll give it to the appropriate department, but I never hear anything back. What gives?

— Posted by Bill

Excellent question — and that’s also one asked of us often. There are actually a number of reasons for this, which I’m happy to explain.

Mayor Bloomberg has made it clear that his administration is to be marked by the accessibility, transparency and accountability of city government and services — and 311 is meant to be the cornerstone of that effort. So the way we’ve delivered on that promise is to focus first and foremost on the customer experience. The city provides a vast amount of services to its customers, through dozens of agencies, and our goal is to get complaints to the right agency the first time, every time. The best way to do that is not to simply serve as directory assistance, but to provide the best customer service possible. To do so, call takers will ask questions up front to ensure they understand exactly what the customer needs … and this often isn’t as simple as it sounds.

So, for example, if you’re calling about noise from your neighbor, that complaint is routed to the Police Department; but if you’re calling about noise from your neighbor’s dog, that goes to the Department of Environmental Protection. Similarly, if you want to lodge a request to have a leaky fire hydrant fixed, that’s also Environmental Protection (which controls the city’s water supply), and not the Fire Department, as many might suspect.

Housing questions, depending on the type of building, and where it is, may be referred to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, or the Department of Buildings, or the New York City Housing Authority.

The point here is that at 311 we have access to nearly 3,000 city services, and it’s not always easy to immediately tell which service is most appropriate. And believe it or not, while it may seem to take a long time to get through the call taker’s questions — and some calls take longer than others, sure — the length of the average a 311 call is about three minutes. Were 311 to act simply as a switchboard, as suggested, I can guarantee you that calls would be shorter. But I also think they’d go to the wrong place more often than not, resulting in callers getting incorrect or inconsistent information, and without having recourse to follow-up on requests. So in the end, we handle calls the way we do because we want 311 to focus on its core competencies (call taking and making sure customers access the right agency) thereby allowing city agencies to focus on theirs (providing city services).

There’s also the matter of efficiency of services delivered to the public, and this is especially true in cases where it seems to be a relatively simple complaint — someone calls to report a pothole, let’s say, but through some questioning on the details it actually turns out to be a cave-in or a sink hole. Now what if 311 simply takes the complaint as a pothole instead, without asking questions, and a pothole crew is dispatched when the condition really is a cave-in — which requires different personnel from a different agency? Well, that’s not only an inefficient use of time and resources, it also prolongs the process for fixing the problem.

Now unless you’re an expert in street construction matters, you probably don’t know the difference between a pothole, a sinkhole, and a cave-in — and 311 exists precisely because you shouldn’t have to. We want you to be able to call one place and speak with someone who can direct your concerns appropriately. And I would argue that the public is better served by spending a little more time on the phone with 311 the first time, so we can get it to the right people to do the job.

Next, transparency. By having nonemergency calls come into a centralized facility, it not only allows the city to track all requests and allocate resources appropriately, it also gives the public better visibility into how well their city works — and how well it doesn’t. Each month, we publish a number of reports on our Web site. These reports provide totals on every inquiry and complaint type that comes into 311 on a monthly basis — compiled citywide and disaggregated by borough, ZIP code, community board and City Council district — as well as the average time it takes the servicing agency to fulfill the requests.

The site I linked above is obviously a great a resource at a macro level, but what about not hearing anything back once you’ve complained, which you also asked about? Well, that’s the third reason our call takers simply don’t put callers directly through to agencies: accountability. First, if you’ve filed service requests previously at 311, you can check their status anytime by calling 311 and giving the call taker your service request number — or you can simply log onto NYC.gov and check the status there — and I’d encourage you to use either means to check on your complaints. Furthermore, if you’re dissatisfied with the service the particular agency has provided in these cases, you can also file complaints against them using 311.

I’m curious about which agencies seem to provide the fastest response — parks, sanitation, etc. Which ones seem to take more time to actually attend to a specific problem?

I’ve called 311 a number of times and have always found the operators to be courteous and very helpful. I think it’s one of the best services the city provides.

— Posted by Liz Seegert

Response time to service requests really varies more based on the complaint type itself than the agency responsible for servicing it. For example, while the Department of Sanitation will respond to a report that a refrigerator has been improperly put out for disposal without its doors being removed as a priority — because of the risk it poses to children — responses to a report of a dirty vacant lot, for example, can take up to 45 business days to fulfill in part because of the legal procedures the city must go through before it can clean private property.

On average, the Police Department, which handles a wide range of quality-of-life-type complaints, has the fastest response time. If you’re curious as to what the average closure times are for specific complaint types, or would just like to get a better appreciation of the multitude of complaint types that the city does respond to, you can check out the various reports available on our Web site.

Along with being courteous, part of good customer service is providing customers with a clear expectation of what occurs after they submit a service request. That’s why 311 has worked closely with other city agencies to identify realistic service levels for nearly all complaint types, enabling our call takers to tell callers how long it may take an agency to respond, and when would be an appropriate time to check the status of their service request (either by calling back 311 or online at www.nyc.gov/portal/site/threeoneone). Additionally, within city government, the service levels I’ve described and the transparency into agencies’ responses through the sites I’ve linked above have created a new expectation of accountability — by making it quite clear which agencies are performing well and which can be performing better.

Why does Bloomberg always tout the 311 system as a great innovation when it was available in Chicago years before it was in New York City?

— Posted by Joey B

You’re right about New York City not being the first to implement a 311 system for city services, but in fact Chicago wasn’t the first, either. That distinction goes to Baltimore, which started its system way back in 1996. (Chicago followed in 1999.) We looked to both of these cities when building our own 311, and the insight we gained was integral to making our system a reality. Since then, we’ve been pleased to offer the lessons we learned to a host of other cities and counties implementing, or planning to implement, systems of their own, including large cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia and — most recently — Newark.

And internationally, our 311 has become a destination for municipal delegations from around the world seeking advice on best practices of call center operation, hosting scores of groups and hundreds of visitors annually. In its five-plus years of existence, 311 has had visitors from more than 30 countries across six continents.

But I think when you consider everything 311 offers, that’s where it distinguishes itself as innovative among its peers. Some 311 call centers in other cities have very specific purposes — specializing in nonemergency police calls, for instance, or serving primarily as a way to make complaints to the mayor’s office. Some others don’t operate on a 24x7x365 basis or receive millions of calls annually; still others can’t provide services in multiple languages.

New York City 311 aims to do all of that and more. We service more than 40,000 calls daily and more than 15 million per year. We offer access to nearly 3,000 unique services across 300 agencies and organizations, any hour of the day or night and in 180 languages. Some of this is no doubt attributable to the sheer size of New York City, sure — with more than eight million residents and even more visitors, you’ll get a lot of calls — but that we continue to improve upon what we offer the public can’t be overlooked.

Just this week, for instance, Mayor Bloomberg announced that New York City 311 is the first one in the country to allow customers to send in pictures and videos accompanying their service requests; I should also add that callers can send pictures and videos to 911 and NYC.gov.

And back in April, the mayor announced that with valuable assistance from the United Way of New York City, and under the direction of deputy mayor for health and human services, Linda I. Gibbs, 311 had become the nation’s largest social service information and referral call center. This was because of an expansion now enabling a team of 30 specially trained 311 call takers, drawing from a knowledge base of nearly 1,000 social services and 1,300 nonprofit organizations, to handle comprehensive social service-related requests at any time of the day or night. If you’re wondering how we went about determining these enhancements to 311, they were based upon priority areas identified by the city’s Center for Economic Opportunity, which Mayor Bloomberg created to reduce the number of people living in poverty in New York City.

In my experience, all the 311 operators have to offer is phone numbers where the phone will never be answered. And “Did you contact your local Community Board?” Is the main training of 311 operators on how to pass the buck? Or how to find fault with the complaint or query?

— Posted by M B

This is an interesting question, especially in light of the first one I answered today. In that case the reader seems to always want to be transferred immediately; you seem to never want to. I think the answer here is that our call-takers are trained on – and most interested in – getting the customer the right answer to the question s/he’s asking; or if a service request needs to be taken, getting it to the right agency to do it. Sometimes this involves asking questions to further refine what the customer’s looking for; sometimes it involves transferring the caller to another City agency – or a state or federal agency if appropriate. And sometimes, there are simply things that the 311 doesn’t have a service for. In those cases, a call-taker may ask whether the customer has tried his or her community board in an attempt to help, not to try and pass the buck or find fault with an inquiry. And if a caller isn’t familiar with community boards or what they do, 311 can explain the boards’ role and help the caller locate his/her board by name or address.

To illustrate this with a few statistics for our readers, in an average month 311 receives about 1.2 million calls – approximately 45% of which are requests for information, 30% result in transfers to outside agencies, and about 10% result in service requests routed to the appropriate agencies for follow-up…the balance being hang-ups, 911 transfers or questions outside of the City’s jurisdiction (like how to boil a chicken, for example). If you’re really interested in the numbers, you can check out these and other performance measures on NYC.gov.

It would be nice if when a person asks a question and the operator does not know the answer, the question will go into a queue where another person will find the answer and put it into the system for when a another person calls with the same question. (I called to find out why the Empire State Building was lit a particular color that night. Otherwise 311 has always worked for me!!)

— Posted by Harris

This is a great suggestion, and something you’ll be pleased to know we already do. The 311 Customer Service Center consists not only of the call takers interacting directly with the public, but also of a team of professionals providing them the most accurate, concise and jargon-free information they need to do their jobs. Our 311 director is always fond of saying there’s only two jobs at 311: call-takers and those who support the call takers – and that’s not far from the truth. Through our 311 Content & Agency Relations team, we work with liaisons from every City agency daily to keep the content in our system fresh. As a result of this work new services are added all the time, either to fill a gap in service – sometimes highlighted by a significant number of 311 calls on the subject – or to create new services as agencies enhance their offerings to the public.

Some recent additions include: procedures to make a complaint against a judge (it depends on the type of court, although most are handled by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct) – which isn’t a new process, but one 311 didn’t have information on previously; and ‘Construction Site Sign Complaint – No Smoking Sign,’ to report that a construction site without “No Smoking” signs posted (this is a new complaint type that goes to the Department of Buildings for follow-up).

As regards the Empire State Building’s colors, based on your comments we’ve updated our content to make it clearer to call takers that for additional information on the building, including an explanation of lighting and lighting schedules, they can transfer callers to the Empire State Building itself or refer them to www.esbnyc.com.

It’s my understanding that the 311 system is based on call tracking systems used in technical support. I’ve worked in technical support for many years, including some large Fortune 500 companies, and one of the biggest challenges with these systems is preventing lazy techs from closing their own calls based on excuses or technicalities without resolving the problem. Ideally, we tried to let the end user be the judge of whether the call was resolved.

Obviously, in a city of eight million people it’s impossible to satisfy everyone. But what measures do you have in place to discourage city workers from marking calls “closed” when the problem is not solved?

My 311 calls which have to do with a need to communicate directly with a city agency are mostly resolved by the operator “accidentally” disconnecting me. The other half of the time they take a “complaint” that is never answered. Since when must a need to communicate be translated into a “complaint”. 311 is the biggest waste of city money ever, it only serves to allay the blame for problems to an endless and unresolved process. The operators have mis-information, are arrogant and 9 times out of 10 one must go to a “supervisor” to even get a person with a brain. Why are taxpaying citizens not permitted to speak directly to public employees and public agencies, there is something fundamentally wrong with this situation.

What's Next

Looking for New York Today?

New York Today is still going strong! Though no longer on City Room, New York Today continues to appear every weekday morning, offering a roundup of news and events for the city. You can find the latest New York Today at nytoday.com or in the morning, on The New York Times homepage or its New York section. You can also receive it via email.

Lookin for Metropolitan Diary?

Metropolitan Diary continues to publish! Since 1976, Metropolitan Diary has been a place for New Yorkers, past and present, to share odd fleeting moments in the city. We will continue to publish one item each weekday morning and a round-up in Monday's print edition. You can find the latest entries at nytimes.com/diary and on our New York section online.

About

City Room®, a news blog of live reporting, features and reader conversations about New York City, has been archived. Send questions or suggestions by e-mail.